Hacker News Reader

andyburkeon The FBI Is Tracking Our Faces in Secret, and We’re Suing

Here are just a couple of recent examples that invalidate your claim. They were pretty easy to find:

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/aclu-defends-article-l...

https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/16/politics/aclu-free-speech-whi...

andyburkeon GitHub tries to quell employee anger over its ICE contract

Children are generally not separated from their parents when their parents commit non-violent minor offenses. Crossing a border is, at the least, non-violent. How major or minor it is is debatable.

The basis of your argument is wrong. What else ya got?

andyburkeon Perfectly Cropped

As an android user who left iOS some years ago, this sounds absolutely awful.

andyburkeon Show HN: Pipedream. Develop any workflow, on any trigger, with auth and no infra

Build a cost model. Set prices that would make them profitable based on that model. Offer the service at that price. See if people are willing to pay for it. Verify that costs and profitability match the model.

If the model turns out to be inaccurate: A) Change the architecture to reduce costs to the point where it becomes profitable at an attractive price point for customers, or B) Move on to the next idea.

It's not that complex, and more startups should be more realistic about profitability.

andyburkeon A man who destroyed his multimillion dollar company in 10 seconds (2018)

^^ this.

Southwest has one of the best, if not the best, safety records of all major air carriers.

andyburkeon Advertising Is a Cancer on Society

Entertainment and relaxation are not unnecessary. Especially in our late capitalist civilizations.

andyburkeon What If Consciousness Comes First?

I would encourage you to think on this some more until the discomfort diminishes. Just because things are deterministic (at a level of complexity that is difficult or even possible to imagine, let alone predict with our current understanding), doesn't mean your experience is any less real or important for you.

Imagine you are on a rollercoaster: you know your course is pre-determined, but you can't see too far ahead, and it sure is a fun and surprising ride along the way.

andyburkeon Dropbox Brings Back Support for ZFS, XFS, Btrfs and eCryptFS on Linux

I've had good luck with pCloud on linux. And you can exclude file patterns, which has been a big improvement for storing my code (ignore all node_modules directories).

andyburkeon Dropbox Brings Back Support for ZFS, XFS, Btrfs and eCryptFS on Linux

Same. I moved when they wanted me to unencrypt my home directory on linux.

I've had good luck with pCloud. In particular, I can exclude file patterns, which has done wonders for my typical workflow (storing lots of code).

andyburkeon Keybase and Stellar is live for everyone

As a relatively long-time Keybase user, I went in and set up my Stellar wallet on my phone. There does not appear to be any way to fund this wallet, though. Reading the comments here, I guess I'd have to buy Stellar on some other exchange and ... transfer it to my wallet? (So I'd have a wallet on an exchange, and a wallet on Keybase?)

This is not good UX.

andyburkeon Show HN: EdgeDB – Next generation database

Can you point an EdgeQL 'server' at, say, an Amazon RDS Postgres cluster?

andyburkeon It seems that Google is forgetting the old web

Hello fellow 40 year old. I run DDG as my daily, but similarly have a hard time finding exact matches for error messages. I am suspicious, however, that I've learned how to use Google's search controls (", +, etc.) and I'm not sure they work the same on DDG. I also can't find a reference on DDG for how to control advanced searches.

So ... although I feel like we might be having the same issue, I'm not sure I'm using DDG correctly enough to say it's a problem.

andyburkeon Google Coral Edge TPU

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...

They seem to discontinue a lot of products, including ones with fairly large user bases. It seems like a valid concern if you're going to try to build something on top of their stuff.

andyburkeon SpaceX Is Raising $500M at a $30.5B Valuation

Not calling them a pedophile?

Additionally, what kind of hubris is it to imagine you can help with a rescue you know little to nothing about, especially in a way that could be viewed as a PR stunt for one of your companies?

The proper response would have been for Elon to say: 'We were only trying to help. I am glad everyone got out ok, and respect what the divers did to make that happen. Perhaps what we built could be used in future situations and we are prepared to work with rescue organizations to see if that is feasible.'

If he had said that, everyone would have cheered him. Instead, he really began his slide off the cliff. Happily, he seems to have calmed down lately. At least, I haven't seen any serious missteps in the last few weeks.

andyburkeon The Golden Age of Rich People Not Paying Their Taxes

I'm with you. But many people do not agree with us, and the last I heard, the ROI on each dollar spent at the IRS is higher than almost anywhere else in government. Hollowing out the IRS, and by extension the federal budget, has been a goal of one of our political parties for a very long time. It's sad to see them succeeding in a way that will cost our country dearly in the long term.

andyburkeon CDC Food Safety Alert: E. Coli Outbreak Linked to Romaine Lettuce

Isn't it more susceptible? The structure of Romaine is such that contaminants can fairly easily get "inside", but are not easily washed away.

andyburkeon Rot8000

Limiting the text box will protect you against the most naive DoS attacks, but you need some kind of limit at the API level (request size, etc.). Never trust the client.

andyburkeon NYC subway and bus services have entered 'death spiral', experts say

Maybe we should form a union?

andyburkeon Salesforce’s Benioff Spars with Twitter’s Dorsey Over Support for Homeless

I was never a Salesforce fan, but Benioff is making me take a second look.

andyburkeon Amazon’s Minimum Wage Will Change How Americans Think About Work

Not to mention that, based on some of the Reddit threads I've seen on this from actual Amazon warehouse employees, they're often not even getting full-time hours. Lots of people seem to be getting 4 6-hour or 3 8-hour shifts a week.

andyburkeon We Now Know More About the Apparent Poisoning of the Pussy Riot Member

Not sure if you've seen these trends: https://news.gallup.com/poll/237137/republicans-positive-rel...

andyburkeon Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?

Yeah, the author's take is myopic. What they call bloat, people from the 70s would call wondrous: ubiquitous networking with and without wires, beautiful graphical interfaces, encryption everywhere (and expanding), far more open systems than proprietary re-engineered ones, the list goes on and on.

andyburkeon Hello, GitHub

I'm not the person you're responding to, but I am turning 40 this year. I was also around for the terror that was Microsoft in the 90s when they were competing with Oracle for "company most desperately trying to kill open source".

I had a similar deep hatred for MS.

In the 00s I spent time as a video game developer and I was forced to use MS tools. And honestly, their developer tools were pretty good. Although I still didn't trust them, I respected them (or at least certain divisions within MS).

In the 10s, I've been mostly doing web stuff. Over the last couple of years I've started using VS Code, and it's actually a great editor and MS seems committed to it and to contributing to some other open source projects.

MS does not strike me as anywhere near the same company they were in the 90s as Gates transitioned out and Ballmer took over. Nadella seems to have a vision for MS that's much more in line with what developers actually want. (The irony of Ballmer's "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!" is palpable.)

I wouldn't consider myself an MS fan, but I also don't view them as the devil they were then. I'm not totally sure what this means for github yet, but I am willing to wait and see before I grab my pitchfork.

andyburkeon Map: US States Renamed as Countries with Similar GDPs

Not sure why you think Carter closed the mental institutions:

"1980 President Jimmy Carter signs the Mental Health Systems Act to improve on Kennedy’s dream [JFK wanted to create a network of community mental health centers where mentally ill people could live in the community while receiving care.].

1981 President Reagan repeals Carter’s legislation with the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. This pushes the responsibility of mentally ill patients back to the states. The legislation creates block grants for the states, but federal spending on mental illness declines."

https://www.kqed.org/news/11209729/did-the-emptying-of-menta...

andyburkeon Silicon Valley Women, in Cultural Shift, Frankly Describe Sexual Harassment

Where are you working that you can reasonably imagine this happening? The risks of someone making this claim are so, so high, yet you believe someone would do this just to 'settle unrelated personal scores'?

andyburkeon Visual Studio Code 1.7 overloaded npmjs.org, release reverted

oops

andyburkeon Never trust the client

Can you give any more insight into this product? Curious what kind of product would have that be ok from a business perspective...

andyburkeon Spideroak Kloak: Zero-Knowlege Social Networking

Not to mention: if everything is encrypted using your password as a key, how do your friends see your posts? Are they encrypted for each friend with that friend's public key?

andyburkeon Spideroak Kloak: Zero-Knowlege Social Networking

Is this just a loss-leader for their backup/storage service? I am a big fan of not being the product, but how does this make money?